Inspire! iPad App Review.

There’s so much going on in our every day lives that a lot of the times we tend to lose track of what really matters, what’s really important. You might be a career-driven or perhaps you’re a family-oriented person. No matter what motivates you to get up in the morning, there comes a day when you lose sight of it. That’s when Inspire! comes in. The iPad app helps you define your personal and professional values, create goals and separate them into tasks that you can plan on a weekly basis. Think of Inspire! as ToDo meets Calendar meets Inspiration.

How does this work?

Open up Inspire! and it will guide through a process of creating your own profile, defining your values and goals and setting up your roles. Think of roles as the different hats you wear throughout your life, not only at your job, but try to generalize. For example, I’m a designer and developer, but also a spouse. You might be a brother or sister, a mother or father, or an artist.

Values are what drive you. Think in terms of discipline, family, passion and leadership.

After you’ve defined your values and roles, you can set long-term goals that you want to achieve. These shouldn’t be thought of as tasks as in a regular ToDo list. A long term goal can be increasing time spent with my family to 3 hours per day in the next three months. Start with something specific and measurable.

For every goal, you can then create objectives and set them up in your weekly planner. For the above example, you can start by planning to spend 30 extra minutes every day with your family this week. Perhaps next week you will increase that amount to 45 minutes. As long as you can track and measure your progress, and, of course, you keep to your planner, you will achieve your goal.

A really beautiful design to boot

Inspire! takes full advantage of the new Retina™ display feature on the third-generation iPad. Even if you don’t own the new iPad, you will still enjoy a fantastic design. The app is intuitive to use, albeit it might seem like it’s all to complex to set up at first. But everything ties in together nicely: values, roles, goals and planning.

You can fully personalize your experience inside Inspire! by adding your own photos to roles and values or the home screen. The background music is calming and delightful, but that’s also something that the developers gave you full control over.

The app basically tries to offer you every incentive possible to encourage you to plan, track and achieve your goals. Implicitly, it encourages you to open up Inspire! every day and enjoy a great experience when using it.

Inspire! integrates seamlessly with iCal or Microsoft Outlook so what you plan in Inspire! is available in your favorite calendar. You can also email tasks and accomplishments to friends or colleagues.

Do I really need this app?

That all depends on you. If you want and need a life planner, then Inspire! is one of the greatest options, albeit it’s a bit pricey in my opinion. But if you’re more of a doer than a planner or if you just, how do I say this, go with the flow, then you definitely won’t care about the planning options that Inspire! is ready to offer you.

They call it a productivity app, but I would personally call it a life planner. It doesn’t have the simple characteristics of a ToDo app nor the complex functionalities of a calendar. But Inspire! manages to combine these two and bring forth a new type of application that wants to empower you to achieve your life goals and dreams, one step at a time.